The Daughter of Time brings Richard III mystery to Charing Cross Theatre

The Daughter of Time | Charing Cross Theatre until 13th September

This new production tackles that old mystery: did Richard III kill the Princes in the Tower? It’s adapted from Josephine Tey’s 1951 detective novel of the same name (Tey’s real name was Elizabeth Macintosh). She wrote five novels featuring Inspector Alan Grant; The Daughter of Time was the last, published posthumously a year after her death.

The book has never been out of print since 1951, and in 1990 it was voted the greatest crime novel of all time by the British Crime Writers’ Association.

Josephine Tey was more than a mystery writer. She also wrote plays and, in 1933, penned Richard of Bordeaux, which launched the career of an unknown actor named John Gielgud. Her fascination with Richard III clearly ran deep.

Now M. Kilburg Reedy has brought her novel to the stage. Going in, I had no idea what to expect. On entering, I was handed a family tree, a full diagram of the Yorks and Lancasters. I joked to an usher, “Are we having a test at the interval?” It felt like preparing for a history exam.

The play is set in a 1950s hospital ward: Alan Grant, confined to a bed after breaking his leg while chasing a criminal, decides to fill his convalescence not with a current case but with the cold case of Richard III and the missing princes. Hospitals were clearly rather different in those days, he manages to conduct a two-month investigation without leaving his bed!

Beforehand, I chatted with a member of the Richard III Society, they were out in force and excited to see the play, which had long been thought impossible to adapt for the stage. Soon I found out why. They laughed at jokes that went over my head, and I quickly realised this is very much a show for the enthusiast.

The production is heavy on exposition; the cast mainly exists to deliver medieval history lectures. We meet two nurses (one a theatre buff, the other more into medieval lore), a detective, and an actor and actress. The actor is rehearsing Shakespeare’s Richard III, and the investigation disrupts his interpretation of the role. There’s also a romantic subplot that feels shoehorned in and is resolved swiftly, and rather unbelievably, at the end.

As you might guess, it’s a static piece. Alan Grant rarely leaves his bed, so I half-jokingly thought of it as “Whose Richard Is It Anyway?” – think Whose Life Is It Anyway? but in a medieval setting. For nearly three hours, exposition and fact after fact were thrown at me.

The actors do their best to keep things alive. Rob Pomfret as Alan Grant has a Herculean task, working through long passages of facts and history, but he manages to create a believable character. Brent Carradine, as the young American Harrison Sharpe, bursts in with a wildly over-the-top performance. He seems to be in a different play from everyone else, but thank goodness for him, he brings much-needed energy to the proceedings.

Ultimately, I’m ashamed to say I gave up. The avalanche of facts wore me down. It feels like three hours of a history podcast. If you are fascinated by this period and considering joining the Richard III Society, this may well be the play for you.

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